In a single product or stable process manufacturing environment, it is easy to control the manufacturing process using a simple material control system. However, such a system does not exist in a semiconductor foundry. There are a variety of products from different industries and from a large variety of customers. To control a wafer processing, a material control system uses a sequence of recipes that contain a process location and a processing parameter. A variety of products require processing using a large and varied assortment recipes. More particularly, the problems encountered to service a variety of products and to manage a large and varied assortment of recipes in a semiconductor or wafer production FAB involve manufacturing engineers, process engineers, specification management engineers, and automation engineers.
Manufacturing engineers have problems targeting equipment for manufacturing due to limited resources and different due dates required for each piece of manufacturing equipment for a variety of different customers. A manufacturing engineer must manage the switching of a process equipment's recipe cluster offline to set limits for processing within a processing machine according to a complex rule naming method.
Additionally, process engineers could not perform differing processing operations using multi-chamber equipment because it is hard to manage a great deal of recipes distributed widely on a variety of equipment. Also, the process engineer cannot access the recipe specification directly but is forced to perform batch processing of recipes.
The specification management engineer must modify recipe specifications frequently and define equipment constraints to allow a piece of fabrication equipment to process an order using a specified process. Only one process at a time could be performed by the piece of fabrication equipment. If a new process needed to be performed by the piece of fabrication equipment, processing requirements within the fabrication equipment had to be changed offline, thus contributing to lower yield within the FAB process.
Conventional material processing systems require complex restriction rules for each piece of equipment to prevent misprocessing of a lot order. Also, conventional material processing systems do not allow assignment of different recipe clusters to different chambers of a multi-chamber piece of fabrication equipment.
The naming rules of the conventional material processing systems required that chambers within a specified piece of multi-chamber processing equipment were processed according to an availability status. Only the lots requiring similar processing could be processed simultaneously by the multi-chamber equipment.
For example, as shown in prior art FIGS. 1 and 2, a matrix showing the equipment constraints of multi-chamber piece of processing equipment identified as NEP002 is provided. The identified equipment has three chambers, chamber NEP002#1, chamber NEP002#2, and chamber NEP002#3 for processing three lots, lot one, lot two, and lot three associated with each chamber respectively, wherein lots one and two require processing using a poly-etch process and lot 3 requires processing using a zero-etch process. In order for the equipment to process the three lot orders, the ME (manufacturing engineer) would manually assign a status to each chamber according to the required process to be performed on each lot.
More particularly, referring to FIG. 1, when lots 1 and 2 requiring the poly-etch process needed processing within chamber 1 and 2 respectively, the status for chamber 1, and 2 would be set to an available status, and status for chamber 3 would be set to an unavailable status to prevent processing of the zero etch lot 3 within chamber 3.
Similarly, referring to FIG. 2, when the lot 3 requiring a zero etch process needed processing within chamber 3, the status for chamber 3 would be set to an available status, and the status for chambers 1 and 2 would be set to an unavailable status to prevent processing of the poly etch lot 1 and 2 within chambers 1 and 2. Thus, because each chamber had to process orders using a set of manually defined rules that prevention of different processes being performed simultaneously within a multi-chamber piece of fabrication equipment, orders could not be automatically executed within a chamber using a MES (material execute system) and the overall efficiency of the system would be reduced. Also, when a specific recipe was not provided to an associated piece of fabrication equipment, the fabrication process would stop to allow for the processing capacity of the equipment to be set accordingly.
Therefore, it is an object of the present invention to provide a method and system to handle those problems for recipe grouping.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a system and method that allows a process engineer to groups recipes into different clusters according to a piece of fabrication machine's process capacity.
It is desirable to provide a method providing a new operating flow for an automated fabrication process.
It is an object of the present invention to group recipes into clusters according to processing capability instead of by ownership of a particular customer order.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a material execute system (MES) having a recipe cluster management engine (RCME) for use with a distributed client-server architecture.
It is another object of the present invention to provide an interface for a user, such as a manufacturing engineer (ME) to manage recipe clusters online using the MES.
It is another object of the present invention to provide an online switching of an equipment's processing capabilities according to a specified recipe cluster.
It is another object of the present invention to improve the processing reliability of a fabrication process by customizing recipes processed by each equipment by allowing a process engineer (PE) to add or modify individual recipe clusters.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a mechanism within the MES to translate proper recipes to a specified piece of fabrication equipment.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide an MES that allows assignment of different recipe cluster to different chambers of a multi-chamber piece of fabrication equipment.
It is yet another object of the present invention to provide a system that allows multi-chamber equipment to simultaneously process different recipe combinations in multiple chambers disposed within a piece of multi-chamber equipment.
The present invention eliminates the complex naming conventions of the existing processing systems by providing a user interface to perform an associated recipe cluster function setup associated with each chamber within the processing equipment.